Questions about driving ability arise on legal cannabis frontier
On Jan. 1, the day recreational cannabis became legal in Illinois, Michael Halberstam and his partner got in a Lyft headed for O’Hare and immediately noticed that the car reeked of weed.
Should they say something to the driver? They wondered.
Traffic was light and they had a plane to catch and the driver didn’t seem impaired, so they let it go.
“It was legalization day,” Halberstam says, “and so we were prepared to be somewhat tolerant of the jubilant mood of marijuana imbibers on that day.”
Besides, for all they knew, a previous passenger was the source of the stink.
A few days later, on their return from O’Hare, they got into an Uber headed home. On the road, the driver took a vape hit that, in Halberstam’s words, “yielded an unmistakable smell.”
Again, they wondered: Say something to the driver? Report him? Again, they let it go. But afterward, Halberstam, who’s the artistic director of Writers Theatre in Glencoe, posted a provocative question on Facebook:
“I’m all for marijuana legalization but this has me asking questions. I didn’t report either driver because they both seemed like nice guys and ultimately functioned perfectly well. So … what to do moving forward? What would YOU do?”
He was flooded with responses, most of which boiled down to: Report ’em.
That verdict made Halberstam uncomfortable — was it fair to jeopardize the jobs of hardworking drivers? — but saying nothing didn’t seem right either.
Halberstam’s quandary and many more questions involving driving high are bound to proliferate as cannabis consumption becomes more common. Unfortunately, the answers to the questions are rarely straightforward.
On Friday, I called Richard Miller, a professor of pharmacology at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, for some illumination.
Does smoking weed affect driving? “Absolutely,” he said. “You should not smoke weed and drive. It has the potential for reducing your ability to drive. It definitely affects motor function.”
He was careful to note that different bodies react to cannabis differently, and that a dose that impairs one person might not impair another.
“Not everybody who drinks alcohol and drives a car has a car crash, right?
But you increase the likelihood that you’ll have one, right?”
Debate on the topic is complicated by the fact that reliable data remain in short supply.
“We’ve established that smoking weed could be bad for our driving,” Miller said. “But in the real world, where weed has been legalized, has that actually happened? Look at a country like the Netherlands, where weed has been legal since 1970. Have you read that the Netherlands has been swept with a tsunami of car accidents? Clearly not. Same in California.”
Driving under the influence of marijuana remains illegal in all 50 states, including those that have legalized it for recreational use. But determining how high is too high to safely drive remains hard to measure.
The science is sketchy. The technology is poor. There’s a national standard for how much alcohol is too much and a roadside breathalyzer for testing it. Neither is true for marijuana.
A few studies have connected driving high with car accidents. According to a 2018 report from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the Highway Loss Data Institute, crashes were up by as much as 6% in Colorado, Nevada, Oregon and Washington compared with neighboring states that hadn’t legalized recreational marijuana. But even that report conceded that measuring marijuana impairment is hard.
In short, in Miller’s words, “We just don’t know yet.”
But we do know that consuming cannabis affects the way we function. That’s why people use it. And that’s
“Not everybody who drinks alcohol and drives a car has a car crash, right? But you increase the likelihood that you’ll have one, right?” — Richard Miller, a professor of pharmacology at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine
why caution is called for. It’s why we need tools and laws that minimize the risk.
As for Halberstam’s quandary? It’s not just a question of driving safely, he said, it’s one of driving professionally. Professionals don’t drive and vape.
I asked him what he plans to do the next time he gets into an Uber or a Lyft and detects weed in the air.
“I think I would ask a question,” he said. “I’d say, ‘I’m in your car. I can smell marijuana.’ I might start a dialogue rather than sitting there passively and going home and reporting them. I’d say, ‘Unless the marijuana is saving you from having a psychotic attack or emotional meltdown, please don’t vape while you’re driving me to the airport.’ ”
He laughed.
“Or I’ll go back to taking the train.”